Wooden Christ Statue Decapitated on Mountaintop

August 07, 2017: A hand-carved figure of Jesus Christ on a cross was placed at 789 meters on the north side of the Traunstein mountain in Gmunden, Austria by members of the alpine club as a gift to a member. They discovered the statue had been decapitated with a saw when they arrived to present the gift on August 7, 2017. Police are investigating.

This vandalism was not the first such act on the Traunstein. Weeks earlier, the summit cross had been painted with a leftist slogan. The head of the Austrian National Forests said they had recently finished repairing damage to another summit cross that had been vandalized in the autumn of 2016.